Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter Read Free Book Online

breathing rapidly. She dragged herself out, dusted her jeans, and strolled a few feet beyond the car’s tire tracks in the mud, as if nothing much had happened. “Beautiful night,” she said. “Look at those stars.” For a moment he thought she was dissociating.
    “Jeez, Patsy,” Saul said, jumping down close to where she stood, “this is no time for being cosmic.” Then he gazed up. She was right: the sky was pillowed with stars. She took his hand.
    “Are you really okay?” she asked. “My God, feel that. You’re shaking like a leaf. You must be in shock.” She wrapped her arms around him and held him fast for half a minute. “There,” she said, “now that’s better.” She studied him. “You’re still drunk. What a mess you are.”
    “We’re not kids anymore,” Saul said. “We can’t get drunk all the time at parties and roll cars. We’ll get killed. We could have died.”
    “But we didn’t.”
    “We
could
have.”
    “All right. Yes. I know. You can die in your sleep. You can die watching television.” She observed him in the dark, as if she were spying on him. “I wish I had been driving. It’s so warm, a spring night, I think I would have been singing along to the radio to stay awake. ‘Unchain My Heart’—I would have been singing along to Ray Charles and I would have stayed awake and we’d be home by now.” She leaned over. “Smell the soil? It’s loamy. You know, Saul, you should turn the car’s headlights off. Save the battery.”
    “Patsy, the car is
wrecked
! Look at it.”
    “Don’t be silly.” She studied the car with equanimity, one hand raised to her face, the other hand cradling her elbow. Patsy’s equanimity was otherworldly and constant. The combination of her beauty and her persistent unexplainable interest in Saul was puzzling to him. “Saul, that car is fine. We might be driving it tomorrow. The roof will have a dent, that’s all. The car turned over softly and slowly. It’s hardly hurt. What we have to do now is get to a house and call someone to help us. We could walk across this field, or we could just take the road back to Mad Dog’s. I’m sure they’re still going strong.”
    “Patsy, I can’t think. My brain has seized up.”
    “Well,” she said, taking his hand, “I happen to like these stars, and that looks like a nice field, and I’d rather stay away from Highway 14 this time of night, what with the drunks on the road and all.” She gave him a tug on his sleeve, and he almost fell. “There you are,” she said. “Come on.”
    As Saul walked across the field, hearing the slurp of his shoes in the spring mud, he saw the red blinking light of a radio tower in the distance, the only remotely friendly sight anywhere beneath the horizon. Just when he thought he had been accepted among these Midwesterners, not just as a Jew but as himself, his car had turned over. Oblivion had almost swallowed him, as his mother had predicted it might. That he was here at all was a sign, he thought, that his life was disordered after all, abandoned to chaos among rural Gentiles, connoisseurs of rifles, violence, and piety. He smelled manure nearby, and somewhere behind him he thought he heard the predatory wingbeat of a bat or an owl. First the Gentiles, then the Gnostics.
    He had thought he was a missionary, bringing education and the higher enlightenments to rural, benighted adolescents, but somehow the conversion had gone the other way, and now here he was, acting like them: going to parties, getting drunk, falling asleep, rolling his car. It was the sort of accident Christians had. He felt obscurely that he had given up personal complexity and become simple in the midwestern style, like those girls who worked at the drugstore arranging greeting cards. They were so straightforward that two seconds before they did anything, like give change, you could see every gesture coming. He was becoming like that. As a personality, Saul had once prided himself on being